Interesting—I checked the date on that Murdering the World entry, and it was April 29th of last year. Almost exactly a year ago. So, early spring, when the weather is turning perfect.
Today I was out walking through parking lots in a shopping center and it happened again—I found myself in the nature-trance, hypnotized by the beauty of the surroundings. I wrote about this a while back in an entry called Murdering the World (why...
Lol—well, my interest in this thread seems to have petered out in the middle of trying to wirte about what makes The Sunken Land move forward at such a great clip. I suppose this means the Lieber Studies are at an end, at least in this...
I forgot to add, they also correspond nicely with the narrative and poetic modes in writing. The narrative being tightly focused and characterised by forward linear momentum toward a goal, and the poetic much more diffused, non-linear, and not...
Relentless time. I sometimes think on what those around me will leave behind. What our legacy will be. Some of my friends have children that will carry on their family name and items.
There seems to be a passage that repeats, if you did not...
At the center of the story is the character of Lavas Laerk. He's a strange visionary genius, but apparently driven mad by his visions, or at least outcast from all human society because they made him really weird. All the men and his servant were...
I've started re-reading it online and immediately discovered the story moves much faster than my description of it. In like a page and a half it's already covered most of what I said, far more succinctly. And I had forgotten the Mouser's...
The Sunken Land can be read online in its entirety as part of the preview of Fritz Leiber and H P Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark. Scroll down a bit to the Contents and you can click on the story's title to read it.
The ring has a key-shaped extension that lays along the finger of its wearer, and there are a few etched drawings of what appear to be ships being sunk by monsters. See, here I feel like I should check. I might have some of the details wrong. But...
Looking at the construction of The Sinking Land
This one has stuck with me and I want to examine how it's put together. It's what I want to call a really tight little unit of a story, where everything that happens contributes to a sense of...
I also notice on the cover for Swords in the Mist Fafhrd's entire body is arched. It's a gesture Leiber uses frequently, not just for the Mouser, but any time one of them is straining powerfully against something nearly immovable. It's one of...
And once again this motif is present on the book covers. Many of the gigantic forms are emerging from mist, but in the last one—Swords and Ice Magic—there's a mountain dimly visible behind them that, if you look closely, has human features in...
Last night I was reading The Seven Black Priests and once again there's a gigantic landscape form that has human features. Several of them in fact. The twain are walking through a region where there's snow and ice everywhere except for an area...
Ideally symbols in a story should function the way they do in dreams, where often any meaning you could assign to it turns out to be one of the many things it's pointing toward. For last night's dream I came up with several possible meanings for...
Oh, and really occult is a perfect name for the unconscious, since it's the part that exists literally 'below the level of conscious awareness'—the part we can't observe in action ('see'). It operates quite literally invisibly in our lives,...
The technical meaning of the word occult is unseen or hidden. So it makes sense that darkness, mist, and invisibility are all symbols of the occult (which stands in for the unconscious and its nightmare realm of Shadow). And therefore that light...
I haven't read much Conan, but in one I did read I noticed frequent use of blackness. I'm sure anybody familair with Howard can confirm it's one of his favorite metaphors/symbols. I remember something like black rain pouring down from a black sky...
More thoughts occurred to me after writing that.
The howling, heaving darkness that the sea has become is the same as the wall of darkness from which the strange mysterious Viking ship emerged. It's the unconscious, mystery, magic. It's the...
I was reading The Sunken Land last night (working my way through the second book, Swords Against Death) and I was struck again and again by his power, economy and—I don't know what to call it—panache? Sparkle? There's something I can't quite put...
In a more general sense of course the underground, the depths of space, and the ancient past are all symbols of the unconscious. Things that come from underground, like things that emerge from the depths of a body of water, are quite frequently...
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